40 Top Tools for Maximizing Marketing Team Productivity

Pulling together a team with all the right skills to market your business should be the hard part - not how they actually work together. The bad news is that this challenge happens far more often than you would think. But the good news is with the right tools, you can turn around your team’s productivity issues and thrive...
There are dozens of tools out there for every facet of marketing team productivity, but in this article, we’ll just look at the top tools that every member of your marketing team can use to boost their effectiveness. From your content strategist to your social media manager, here are the top 40 tools for maximizing the productivity of your marketing team.

The job of the project manager is to oversee the work of the other team members. As a result, they need to be able to track deliverables, implement a cohesive workflow, increase accountability, and manage internal and external communication. Here’s how to help them be more productive:

1. Wrike.Plan and organize your online marketing campaigns in a real-time workspace. Manage incoming requests, delegate tasks, and track work progress in real time.Wrike delivers that in a real-time workspace.

2. CoSchedule. An editorial calendar makes the life of a marketing project manager a lot easier, and CoSchedule is one of the best. Plan your blog, social media, and more in one place.

3. IBM Watson Marketing. Formerly known as Silverpop, IBM Watson Marketing is a digital marketing platform that unifies your marketing automation, social media, email and more. You can converse with prospects on multiple platforms while measuring your relational results.

4. Evernote. Evernote is a great (and free!) system for managing notes, source documents, important information, and even travel receipts. With its tagging system and multiple input options, nothing will ever be lost. It’s a favorite among the marketing/growth team at When I Work.

5. Widen. Widen allows you to create, manage and distribute content easily. This digital asset management software can be a hub for your marketing materials.

6. Google Trends. What keywords are trending near you right this minute? Google Trends shows you the data and related visualizations so you can figure out if an idea or a keyword is good enough for your campaign.

7. Prezly. And what about stakeholders? Prezly makes it easy to track and communicate with them so they hear all the latest updates on your projects. The tool gives you newsrooms, contact management, and even outreach.

8. Zoom. When it's time for your marketing meetings, Zoom gives you HD video conferencing, screen sharing from desktop or mobile, recording features, and the ability to choose full screen or gallery views for video streams.

Content Strategist

Your content strategist curates existing content and creates new content, releasing it according to your content marketing plan. This content ultimately helps bring in new prospects and customers who are already warm to your ideas. Support these initiatives with the following tools:

9. Content Insight. Content Insight's Content Analysis Tool allows you to create a comprehensive summary of existing content plus their analytics data, giving you an inventory to draw on for content curation and repurposing.

10. Curata. Being able to find and share relevant content in a time effective way is vital, and Curata is the top tool for positioning your brand as a thought leader.

11. Ahrefs. This tool is useful for checking SEO backlinks as well as accomplishing research on competitor keywords. What content pieces are your competitors ranking for? Which sites link back to your posts? Ahrefs answers it all.

12. Snappa. Being able to edit your image dimensions, and have them immediately usable within a specific network such as Facebook or Twitter is a necessity for today's content marketers. Not to mention being able to add text, effects, or additional graphics. Snappa makes it easy to do all of the above.

13. Office 365. Let's face it, no content marketer is complete without access to this set of tools. Office 365 gives you the complete suite of online Office apps including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneDrive, and OneNote.

14. Grammarly. Nothing says “unprofessional” like content full of errors. Grammarly will catch up to 10 times more errors than your normal word processor.

15. Canva. Today’s content is visual as well as written, and Canva is a top tool for creating graphics for every content channel.

16. Piktochart. Infographics are a great way to share information in an easy-to-consume way, and Piktochart provides graphic templates to make it simple to create them.

A social media manager is an essential team member in today’s digital marketing environment. They will share content, engage followers, and measure the success of your social campaigns, so support them with the right tools:

17. Storify. Collecting social media mentions of a topic or trend is a great way to jump into conversation, and Storify makes it easy. You can curate all the best social media content in one place.

18. Buffer. Scheduling content to multiple social media platforms in one easy system is key to social media success, and Buffer makes it possible. Link all your profiles and share content to them immediately or over time.

19. Mailshake Mailshake allows you to build relationships with influencers who can then share your message with their followers. Influencer marketing is a vital part of a great social media program.

20. BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo allows you to see what content is performing best on your own social accounts as well as those of your competitors. Discover content, research your rivals, and more.

22. Crowdfire. How about a free app on mobile or desktop that helps you grow your crowd on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and more? Crowdfire has growth tools that make it easy to build an audience — in a totally legal way.

23. Pixlr. Every social media manager needs tools to edit graphics on her mobile device. And Pixlr is one of the more robust apps (and still free) that give you the ability to create collages, or add overlays, effects, filters, and text to your social images.

24. Hootsuite. Collaborate on your social media accounts with Hootsuite. The tool gives you multiple users, multiple social profiles for all your brands/products, and even analytics reports to track social success. A must for managing all your channels.

All the marketing in the world doesn’t matter if you don’t know how well it’s performing. Your data analyst fills this important role, keeping track of your marketing efforts and the ROI that you are getting. Here are the top five tools your analyst should be using:

25. Landing Page Grader. A free tool created by LeadPages, the Landing Page Grader allows you to enter any site and receive a comprehensive overview of how well it’s working for you.

27. Kissmetrics. If ecommerce is part of your business, you need to know how your customers are behaving on your site and checkout page. Kissmetrics ties anonymous activity to a user profile once the visitor becomes a customer.

28. Simply Measured. Simply Measured allows you to analyze social media results across nine different platforms and creates comprehensive reports.

29. SEMRush. You probably run paid and organic search campaigns, but do you know how well your keywords are doing? SEMRush gives you the ability to track their performance.

30. Outreach. How do you know what your prospects are reading, or downloading? What messaging resonates with them? Outreach, though primarily a sales engagement tool, also has powerful analytics for marketers to look into audience engagement with content.

Who's in charge of the backlinks, the keywords, and checking to see if the website is healthy in terms of being indexed by search engines and being found by prospective customers? None other than the SEO specialist, who must wrangle intent out of (sometimes random) search phrases. These tools help your SEO expert to efficiently manage it all.

31. Google Search Console. It's free and it's extremely powerful for monitoring the health of your website. Google Search Console is an SEO tool that allows you to see your performance on Google Search, how many of your URLS have been indexed, and CTR. Essential learning.

32. SEOquake. This free Chrome/Firefox browser extension gives you the power to conduct on-page SEO audits, examine internal links, and compare domains and URLs in real time. SEOquake packs a lot of power into a tiny bunch of code.

33. Google Keyword Planner. And of course, the quintessential SEO tool that gives you search results that can be immediately actionable. It helps you find long tail keywords, with the least amount of competition, and with high search volume. Best thing about Google Keyword Planner? It's free.

34. MozBar. This Chrome browser extension adds a toolbar from Moz.com, which makes SEO research convenient. MozBar shows you Page Authority and Domain Authority of any site or page, it also allows you to find and highlight keywords on a page, and more.

35. Yandex Metrica. Yandex is the Russian Google and Yandex Metrica is their analytics tool. Included in this free service are heat maps, as well as the ability to replay video of user sessions — you get to see how users are interacting with your website. (Just make sure to warn users first, okay?)

Your technical specialists are often troubleshooters for your other team members, but they have their own needs as well. Someone who knows how to code, develop apps, work with APIs, and build retargeting sequences is an indispensable team member - and all of the following tools will help them get the job done:

36. AdRoll. Retargeting is how you keep your message in front of your prospects when they don’t initially buy. AdRoll allows you to reach 98% of the internet to make the magic happen.

37. AppMachine. Developing mobile apps is a great way to extend your marketing reach, and AppMachine makes it easy for your technical specialist to do it. You can develop apps for events, holidays, or special promotions.

38. CA API Management. Managing APIs will give your digital marketing more flexibility, depth, and power. CA API Management is the tool that you use to develop initiatives while keeping data secure.

39. Zapier. Sometimes you use a variety of tools that don’t natively talk to each other. Fortunately, with Zapier, integration becomes simple. Set up as many zaps as your account allows, and watch your tools react to each other easily.

40. Stack Overflow. Even the best technical specialist has questions, and Stack Overflow is a free community-sourced help platform for programmers of all kinds.

Of course, the 40 tools listed above just scratch the surface when it comes to tools that you can use to boost productivity among your teams and throughout your business.
Are there any others you think deserve a place here? Let us know by leaving a comment with the marketing productivity tools you can’t live without.
About the Author:Rob Wormley is a content marketer and author. Over the past seven years, he has developed digital marketing, content marketing, and growth strategies or best-selling authors, Hall of Fame speakers, and businesses all across the country. He currently works as Head of Content Marketing at When I Work.